Babel. Or how I learned machine-speak

Advances in software mean that, before long, everyone will be talking to their computers. But Janelle Brown discovers there are some naughty words they just won't translate I thought about starting this article, on computers that turn your speech into text, with a lament about my long-suffering wrists, which - thanks to my prodigious typing - have lately been in a state of anguish.

I didn't write this entire article with speech-recognition software - though I did compose bits and pieces of it using my new Dragon Naturally Speaking program. That, in itself, is indicative of just how far "listening computers" still have to go before we're all using it in our everyday lives.

To be blunt, the four days I spent testing voice-recognition software programs added up to perhaps one of the most frustrating experiences I have ever had with a computer. I spent hours repeating myself over and over, talking in the peculiarly stilted manner that voice-recognition software forces upon its users, waiting for words to spill across the page and catch up with my own garbled speech.

It's not a task for those low on patience - I discovered quite quickly that Dragon Naturally Speaking knows how to spell "goddamn it" but has a hard time with "f***ing computer" - and it takes great will not to give up exasperatedly and type instead.

Speech-recognition technology has improved, however, and continues to do so. Further progress is inevitable; researchers like Professor Theodore Berger at the University of Southern California are already coming up with new break-throughs that promise astonishingly accurate results in the near future. And speech interfaces are, slowly but steadily, creeping into our lives.

The market for speech technology has more than doubled in the last two years - speech-recognition software sales in 1997 hovered around the 200,000-unit mark; in 1999 so far, more than 522,000 units have already been sold. So even if I didn't have the patience today to use speech technology to input this entire article, I have no doubt that someday I will. Experts predict that within the next five years, we will merely dictate phone numbers and addresses into our personal digital assistants, instead of typing them in. We'll ask our house to turn on the light for us and casually tell our computer to download the front page of the New York Times. We'll ask our cell phone to call the doctor; our car to tune the radio; our VCR to record the next X-Files episode. We won't need a keyboard, stylus, mouse or even our fingers. Just a mouth.

Using speech-recognition software is a two-way street. Not only must you learn how to use the software; the software has to learn how to use you. To train the software, you read documents aloud (in my case, snippets from Alice in Wonderland) for anywhere from five minutes to a half an hour, while the software learns to recognise your voice then you can start dictating documents.

All of these products boast accuracy of 90% on up; but getting to that optimal recognition is a tricky, painful process - in fact, there are entire books dedicated to explaining how to use the software correctly. These products can accurately transcribe your words, but only after you've mastered the ins and outs of proper dictation, specific commands and the oddities of voice-activated computer controls.

I also learned early on that all of my office-mates can hear every word I say - and it's difficult to be a linguistic maestro (or to compose personal e-mails) when you know everyone around you is listening.

Most important, it's not easy to compose an article orally - it's a bizarre feeling to verbalise sentences rather than let words fall from your fingertips. If you aren't careful, it'll be an awfully slow process: Just the last two sentences alone cost me three minutes of "scratch that" and "select that" and "move to end of sentence."

In fact, using speech-recognition software can stunt the creative writing process - you end up feeling like a computer program, thinking in short phrases with your voice as the command line. The natural cadence of my sentences came out stiff and dry; my thoughts were interrupted by a constant need to correct mistakes the program had made. I felt like an automaton; not an author.

Meanwhile, there are technical hurdles. We need hardware advances like stronger, cheaper chips with more processing power and bigger memory caches, to make the technology not only fast but affordable. We need software with better accuracy and more intuitive understanding of human language. And, as mothers and teachers around the world will probably rejoice to hear, we humans also need to learn to speak more clearly and accurately, so that our machines can understand us.

A good pair of earplugs might also be a useful investment, too - if everyone starts speaking to the machines that surround us, instead of pushing buttons or flipping switches, imagine the cacophony of commands that await us. We may save our hands, our wrists and our fingers. But what about our ears?

Copyright 1999
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